ABOUT ANGELA

Born in Worcestershire, but growing up in Warwickshire, Angela studied drama and Laban movement at Bretton Hall (Leeds University) in Yorkshire. She acted professionally, and taught drama, movement and English at secondary school level in Coventry and then London. In the late 1960s, with a family to support, she changed tack and developed a career as an editor. In the early 1980s, she co-packaged original books under the name Overall Publications. In 1986, Angela went to Japan for a holiday and a new perspective. Twenty-six years later, she and her Japanese husband relocated to Scotland.

While living on the Pacific coast, south of Yokohama and Tokyo, Angela wrote features, columns and weekly profiles for The Japan Times from 1987-2011. Between 1989-96, she was Japan Correspondent for Asia Magazine in Hong Kong. She also co-edited and wrote for TGA EYE (1987-96), a client magazine for a company of pioneering Japanese women.

In 1998 she was commissioned by the Times Group in Singapore to contribute to a series on capitals of the world. ‘Insider’s Tokyo’, illustrated with her own photographs, was published in 2001.

She spent the next decade writing a book concerned with ancestral links and based on end-of-the-millennium (1999) travels in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay. You can find CHASING SHOOTING STARS – A South American Paper Trail into the Past, available (finally published 2013) on www.amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com, Amazon.co.jp, etc.

In late 2017 she published HOUSEHOLD STORIES/Katei Monogatari – a love story with a difference – about the Japanese-Western house she lived in for a decade before moving from Japan to Scotland. This also is available from Amazon, print-to-order. A quick point of entry in the UK: https://tinyurl.com/ya37txh5.

“One can choose to go back toward safety or forward toward growth. Growth must be chosen again and again; fear must be overcome again and again.”  Abraham Maslow

Angela’s life-enhancing course – DRAWING ON THE WRITER WITHIN (DOTWW) – is creatively and dramatically transformational work intended for anyone who has ever wanted to write and/or move their life forward, but thinks they cannot, or do not know how to begin. Anyone can write. We all do. For example, we write lists, reminders, e-mails every day.

Yet the idea of consciously putting words onto paper often makes us freeze, or panic. Why is this? It is the terror of thinking of ourselves as creative beings. It is the terror of Art, of being a Writer.

With DOTWW and PW (Proprioceptive Writing, a meditational methodology incorporated into the course, but which can also be practised in groups or at home), “Everyone gains confidence; they hear they have a writing voice. They also discover that what they are saying is of interest to others, and that their words can move people – a great thing to realise and often quite a surprise. Actors have this awareness all the time when they stand on a stage, but most of us don’t realise that we have it at our fingertips – literally.” (Metropolis magazine, Tokyo, 2006).